Deadburg PC Update – June

Steam Direct

In my last post I mentioned trying to decide between Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct. Well since then the choice has been made for me. Steam Direct opened up for developers and I’ve got it setup for Deadburg. This will allow me to invite people to test the game on Steam, and they’ll be able to download the game like any other Steam game. It will also automatically keep those testers updated with the latest build. In short it’s a bit step forward towards a working test version.

I should note, at release Deadburg will require Steam to play. This is mostly a matter of convenience for players and myself. Steam gives me a friends list, server browser and supporting features similar to Xbox Live on the 360. If Deadburg does well then having a Steam-less version of the game is something I might pursue, depending on whether enough people want it.

Performance

I’m beginning to add performance options to the game. The goal is to let players on a wide variety of hardware play Deadburg at reasonable frame rates (60fps is my goal). Right now the biggest perf issue appears to be the new shadows system, which isn’t particularly surprising. So I’ve added options to tweak the detail of the shadows as well as how “soft” the shadows appear in game. Doing so I was able to get my laptop to run the game at 1080p at 60fps with shadows enabled. There’s likely more optimizations that can be done, but it’s good enough for testing.

That’s all for this month. I had to do an update for another project that ate a good chunk of June. But I’m back full time to Deadburg for July and the main goal right now is getting a version that can be tested by you folks.

So I can’t do any more updates for the 360 version as Microsoft closed down updates last year. I’d like to bring Deadburg to PS4 and XB1 but I don’t have the dev agreements with Sony/Microsoft yet, so I can’t promise that at this point. It’ll depend on if the game does well on Steam, if it does then I can probably bring it to consoles, if not then it will be tougher.

Once I’m ready for testing I’ll be able to provide test keys. At this point I’m assuming anyone who wants a key will get one. If you join the mailing list you’ll be notified when it’s available for testing.

It’s something I’ve thought about. The issue right now is that there’s not enough content to put out regular videos. As the base game is more fleshed out and I’m doing more content updates I think it’s something I might use.

It gives more attention to the game and brings in a bigger community from new videos to live streams. I could do one for Deadburg and it would be good because of all the new updated content being added into the game with update videos being released on youtube to show off the new content being made in Deadburg. I hope you would like to cooperate with the idea. Thanks 🙂